


all along the western front

by iroirong



Category: DCU (Comics), Titans (Comics)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Prohibition Era, Bootlegging, Gen, San Francisco Bay Area, this is an au for like three people and i'm one of them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 03:33:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29182575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iroirong/pseuds/iroirong
Summary: The history of the United States can be told in eleven words: Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Volstead, two flights up and ask for Gus.(1920s AU: The Titans are prohibition-era rum-runners.)
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Donna Troy, Titans - Relationship
Comments: 5
Kudos: 27





	all along the western front

The view from across the bay was spectacular; where there would someday be a suspension bridge known the world over, there was just clear blue water unspoiled, the Golden Gate strait barely shrouded in June Gloom. The cacophony of seagulls hadn't started up yet, leaving just the crash of the waves against jagged rock the only noise in the early morning. That and the occasional sound of shouting from below, on the docks, from where the morning's shipments were coming in.

Dick breathed in the sharply cold sea air, waiting and freezing in his jacket as Donna set up her camera, her skirts swirling around her as the breeze less tugged and more pushed them both around. Her monstrosity of a camera, full of metal and mess, wouldn't have been handheld for anyone without Amazonian strength. 

"C'mon, Donna," Dick said -- he would resolutely deny that he was whining -- while leaning against the railing, watching with squinted eyes as a boat slowly chugged its way out of the strait. "It's dark inside the bar, how good do the prints have to be?"

"They're for me, not the customers," Donna said, adjusting her position again. Dick rolled his eyes as she squatted and tilted, angling the camera maybe half a degree away from what it was before. Without looking away, Donna smacked him in the shins. It only sort of felt like she just snapped his shinbone, so that must have been what she would call a love-tap.

"Ow!" Dick protested. "Didn't that mess up your shot?"

"I'm holding steady," Donna hummed. "Hey, did you hear about Roy's trial?"

"You were worried about Roy's trial?" Dick asked, eyebrow raised.

"Nope. But he's been telling this story to anyone who'd listen; get this. It ended with a hung jury because they all drank the evidence. They're calling it jury nullification."

Dick snorted. "Even if you split that up with eleven other people, I'd hate to have that hangover the morning after."

"Ah, it's fine," Donna said. "Roy only got busted on the weak stuff anyways. Look at this nation that Carry's carrying."

"Hey," Dick said, "Don't knock the Anti-Saloon League; They're keeping us in a job."

Donna didn't deign to answer that with more than a sniff, fiddling again with her camera. Dick closed his eyes and turned his head to the breeze, letting it cast his hair completely in disarray. It was getting long, due for either a cut or for him to hand Garth a pair of scissors and sit on the tiled bathroom floor with a towel laid down. 

"Which ocean do you like better?" Donna asked suddenly, her camera making those whirring and clicking noises Dick had learned to associate with her finally committing an image to film.

"What?" Dick asked. "Is that something people have opinions on?"

"It's something I have an opinion on," Donna shrugged. "I like the Atlantic."

"What's the difference?" Dick asked. "They're both cold. Hypothermia if you fall in either one."

"I think the Atlantic is louder," Donna said. 

Dick snorted. "I just think Gotham's louder."

Gotham was also perhaps the only city besides New York that could beat San Francisco in its flouting of the 18th Amendment. At least, Dick supposed this. He'd left long before Volstead got enough of the nation to go dry, with no idea of how his family was handling the new rules around liquor and the resulting mob action. Gotham crime families were bad enough with business as usual; Dick shuddered to think about the Maronis and the Falcones clashing over "distribution rights."

He also didn't want to think about how his father would react to his new field of employment.

"You know when Wally's rolling in from the blind pig in San Mateo?" Donna asked, finally getting up. Dick pushed off the railing with a relieved sigh, stretching fingers that had gone stiff in the chill. 

"He should get here any minute," Dick said. "Just in time for the rush of college kids from South Bay this weekend."

"Who are we to deny anyone of the grand tradition of drinking until you pass out during the Big Game?"

"Who are we, indeed," Dick said. "Come on, let's get back to the 'soda shop,' I'm freezing my limbs off."

"I think you've been spending too much time out here," Donna teased. "You're forgetting how to handle even a hint of cold, let alone some snow."

"You grew up on a Greek island," Dick grumbled, following Donna's confident lead away from the pier. "How do you even know what snow is?"

"It snows on Themyscira," Donna said, rolling her eyes.

They walked down Market and took the cable cars back to Fisherman's Wharf, the various lines long since pared down in the wake of the great quake. Dick and Donna sat quashed together on the bench with a whole early-morning crowd as the Powell-Mason line trundled past Chinatown up Nob Hill, the little cookie-cutter box houses perched precariously on their sharply inclined roads. Dick amused himself by tilting his head as the cable ran past, trying to compensate for the shaking of the car and the skewed slant at which the leaning houses of San Francisco perched, bringing them right side up in his field of vision at the cost of the look of their bottoms seeming sliced at a bias. 

"Stop that," Donna muttered, "your big head is gonna hit my nose."

"Do it with me then," Dick said.

"One of us has to be mature," Donna said primly before conceding to Dick's look and tilting her own head too, shutting one eye to better center the houses with a photographer's eye.

They crested Nob Hill and the operator dropped the rope with a precision born of a decade of practice, right at the apex of their ascent, letting the train coast down on gravity for the three and a half blocks to lurch right on Mason. Dick closed his eyes and savored the swoop in his gut, the mild adrenaline rush that came from trusting nothing in the world but gravity to pull you down, an electric feel that was a shadow of a fraction of what it felt like to jump off a trapeze.

The car dumped them all out at the end of the line, Fisherman's Wharf, spilling the stragglers out onto the waterlogged wood docks to stagger in the cold, humid morning air. Already, the morning catch was displayed out on rickety wood stands, the whole plaza slick with seawater. The smaller fishing boats were all lined up against the docks, their masts and oars and sails sticking out at crosswise angles like a thicket of brambles. 

The two crossed the morning market, the shout of sellers following them with their pitches for some halibut or bass, fresh, ready to make for dinner.

At least two of them mistake Dick and Donna for a married couple, haranguing Dick about getting something fancy for the missus, which makes him scowl a little and Donna laugh.

"I'm honestly a little offended," Donna said, pulling her ring of keys out as they stopped in front of the door, opening their humble soda shop for the day. "A girl like me? Settling for a guy like you?"

"Tongue like that," Dick said back, opting to hop lightly over the seats and counter rather than take the long way around, "You'd settle for whatever you could get."

"I think I could convince Lilith to get a Boston marriage with me," Donna shrugged.

"You both have to be rich for that," Dick said. Now he pulled out his own ring of keys, unlocking what was purportedly the employee back room. At least, that's what they always told the cops.

"So long as President Wilson keeps prohibition going, we stay in business," Donna said, flashing a smirk, "and so long as we stay in business, we get rich."

"Relying on a murderer and a dictator to keep his Temperance morals?" Dick said. "Risky."

"If Slade Wilson is anything," Donna said, "it's reliable."

She brushed past him into the backroom, migrating instantly to behind the bar to check the stock. Where the rest of America would be brewing moonshine in their bathtubs, hoping both that the industrial alcohols they were converting into something drinkable hadn't been poisoned by the government or that their teenage children weren't about to mess up the ratios and give themselves brain damage off homemade alcohol, California -- with its long and notoriously hard to police coastline -- was enjoying the finest Canadian liquors, freshly "imported" each week. The whole city, overnight, had become exactly as fluent in Quebecois French as they needed to be.

The front door -- the real one -- jingled with a bell that served as both a cheery greeting for a customer and a warning for the cashier. Dick hurried out past the door, only to relax when he caught a glimpse of red hair, tucked half-hazard under a cap.

"Roy," he greeted.

"What's up," Roy said over his shoulder, holding the door open for Garth to file in as well. Garth waved, his long-sleeved shirt scrupulously pinned to hide the tattoos underneath. 

"Donna's in the back already," Dick said to Garth. "Roy, you're with me. We're just waiting on Wally."

Roy sat down heavily at one of the stools set up along the counter, immediately reaching across to fiddle with the leaky syrup pump. 

"For one of the fastest men alive," he muttered, "Wally drives like that Model T is brand-spankin' new and he's worried he's gonna nick it."

"Better cautious than sorry," Dick said, pulling out one of the new records he and Donna had bought a few weeks ago -- some New Orleans by way of Chicago jazzman, name like Baron, or maybe Duke -- to play as the shop's more legitimate face started to do some business. A few children trickled in, some of whom he recognized. 

There were a pair of Chinese girls, 8 and 6 respectively, whose father was a dockworker and often left them to wander the Embarcadero during the summers; they reminded him a little too much of his own younger brother, so Dick often, at the amusement of everyone else in their establishment, let them pick whatever they wanted, on the house. In addition, there was a teenage boy who'd been somewhat unsuccessfully courting the girl who worked in the apothecary across the street, providing them all some free entertainment when he convinced her to take a break in the soda shop. And a few older regulars would set up at a table somewhere, play some crosswords; it seemed, often, like the whole country had gone mad for them overnight. Dick doubted prohibition was enforced in New York City, seeing as there was no way anyone sober would go through on producing a Broadway musical over newspaper games.

Donna and Garth had come out for their lunch break when Dick started to get worried; Wally could get late, often, but he was never this late. Judging by the slight pinch to Donna's lips and the nervous fidgeting of Roy's hands, as well as the way Garth kept unsubtly jerking around to look at the door each time someone new came in, the others were feeling it too.

When the familiar block on wheels that was Wally's delivery truck came into view through the glass windows, Dick all but ran straight out on his next customer. 

"What happened?" Dick asked breathlessly as he opened the door, rushing over the sidewalk to get to the driver's side window. "Were you held up by the buttons?" _Did the cops almost catch you?_

Behind him, he heard three other sets of footsteps fan out around him. Wally, for his part, was smiling lopsidedly, one elbow hanging out the window of the car.

"Nah," he said, infuriatingly slow. "Just picked up a hitchhiker, that's all. Joey, say hi to my friends."

Dick finally took in that there was someone in the passenger seat. Young; probably close in age to them, blonde, shockingly familiar.

"Wally," Donna said from behind him. "Please tell me you didn't kidnap the President's kid." She said this very reasonably, which was nice. Dick felt a little like passing out, himself.

"I didn't," Wally said, right when Joseph William Wilson piped up: "I came voluntarily."

"We're going to get in trouble," Roy said. "We're gonna get in so much trouble."

"Please," Wilson's kid said. "My dad is looking for me, and I don't want him to find me, and he's always talked about how much of a thorn in his side the Titans were, and I couldn't think of anyone else who could help me, and --"

"Hey," Dick said softly, already cursing both his soft spot for kids with daddy issues and Wally, whose smile had shifted into a full-blown knowing smirk. "It's fine. Joey, it's fine. We got you."

"Really?" Joey asked.

"Really?" Roy echoed behind them. Dick ignored him.

"Welcome to the Titans, Joey."

**Author's Note:**

> there really was a trial of a bootlegger in SF that ended with the jury drinking the seized alcohol and then getting put on trial themselves. paris of the west, baby.
> 
> come chat about batman and co.! https://batman-plus-server.tumblr.com/join


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